Take better selfies with your iPhone’s timer mode

Gather all your friends for a groupie with the timer on your iPhone. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

It can be tricky to get the best shot when taking a selfie or group shot with your iPhone. If you want a better angle than the length of your arm can provide (or your ridiculous selfie stick will telescope to), you might consider setting your iPhone on a ledge or tripod and using the built-in timer mode to get yourself and everyone else into position before the shutter goes off.

It’s not super-tricky, but you do need to know where to look. Here’s our recipe to enable timer mode on your iPhone.

Choose the length of your timer with a tap. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Launch the Camera app on your iPhone, and swipe to set it to one of the static photo modes, either Photo or Square. Note the little timer icon in the upper area of the screen, just to the left of (or above, if you’re in landscape orientation) the Switch Camera icon.

You’ll see three options when you tap the timer icon: 10s, 3s and Off. Tap the number of seconds you’d like the camera shutter to delay. Then, when you tap the button to take your pictures, you’ll see the flash blink once for each second of delay. If you use an iPhone 5s or above, the Camera app will take a burst of 10 photos, making it even easier to get the perfect shot.

Now you can set up your iPhone and get in the shot yourself before the shutter goes off, or get some interesting angles from a tripod.